SysAdmin Adventures » hald http://blog.tpa.me.uk Tech notes from a Systems Administrator Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:09:09 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 If your keyboard and mouse are not working in X in Slackware 13… http://blog.tpa.me.uk/2009/09/22/if-your-keyboard-and-mouse-are-not-working-in-x-in-slackware-13/ http://blog.tpa.me.uk/2009/09/22/if-your-keyboard-and-mouse-are-not-working-in-x-in-slackware-13/#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:27:25 +0000 Zordrak http://blog.tpa.me.uk/?p=160 At least once a week I see someone with this issue.

With reference to my earlier post about Xorg + Hal, by default, Xorg in Slackware 13 gets its hardware information from hald instead of an xorg.conf file. If you have no xorg.conf file and hald is not running, your keyboard and mouse will not work when you start X.

  • The Cause: You disabled or broke hal.
  • The Solution: Darwinist Determinism.

Failing the first solution:

chmod a+x /etc/rc.d/rc.hald
/etc/rc.d/rc.hald start

Then restart X or reboot (probably easier to just reboot and it clears any anomalies).

If it still doesn’t work, check that your /etc/rc.d/rc.hald script is not empty (I don’t know how he did it, but I did see someone who’d zeroed his script during an upgrade).

If it still doesn’t work, then you probably actually have a problem rather than just a failure on your part and it’s time to go searching for likely causes. Best place to start would be to google your specific hardware in relation to hal.

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